Hope Dies Last

Eliseo Medina

I first met him thirty years ago when he was an organizer for Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers (UFW). "I am the executive vice president of the Service Employees International Union SEIU, the fastest-growing union in America."

I was born in Mexico. My father used to come to the United States in the forties and fifties. First as an undocumented worker, then as a bracero, and then again as an undocumented worker. Finally, in 1954, my whole family decided we'd move to the United States. We sold everything we had back in my hometown. We moved to Tijuana, right on the border. My father came across to the U.S. as an undocumented worker who'd work in the fields while we stayed behind processing our immigration papers. In 1956 we got the immigration papers, and all of us, the whole family, moved to Delano, which is a very small farmworkers' town. My father and my mother and my older two sisters went to work picking grapes, peaches, oranges, peas, cotton, whatever there was. The three youngest kids, they put us in school. We'd go to work in the fields on weekends and on school vacations until I graduated from the eighth grade. Then I also went to work in the fields. I was a grape and orange picker until the farmworkers strike began in 1965. I joined in that. It was the most exciting thing I'd ever seen. I was nineteen years old and it was great.

Everybody came to the U.S. because they saw hope and an opportunity to make a new life for themselves. I remember my father and my mother kept saying they wanted their kids to do better than they did. They saw it as sacrificing for their children. So when I went to work in the fields, I was fifteen, I just thought, This is the way things are, and if we don't like a particular grower, the only thing that we can do is quit and go somewhere else. I never thought we could do anything other than quit and keep moving on. Until the union began.

I remember going to the first strike meeting of the UFW, which was held on September sixteenth, Mexican Independence Day. This was 1965, when they took a strike vote to actually go out. It was at a Catholic church hall, and the place was packed. There were people on the sides, on the walls, everywhere, electricity in the air. Anger, but also mixed in with a sense of hope and power. Oh, it was a wonderful, hopeful moment. I'll tell you, I left that meeting two hours later and I was on a high. I had actually not been working for about six months because I had broken my leg. I had about, like, fifteen bucks in a little piggy bank. I'd throw in whatever pennies I had. I broke it the next morning, I went into the union and paid three months' worth of dues, which was three-fifty a month at the time. I was sold, I was ready to go. Two days later, I was at home watching I Love Lucy and my mother and my sister came running in. "We're on strike, we're on strike!" I'd never seen my mother so excited as I did that day.

This was unbelievable. My mother grew up in a very sheltered small town, a typical Mexican upbringing, very conservative. But I tell you, there was a light in her eyes. And up until the day that she died, she was solid union.

A lot of us, particularly people who were bilingual like myself, saw on television what was going on in the South, and we thought, God, if they can do it, we can, too. So that's how I got involved with the labor movement.

A friend of mine and I went down to the Filipino Hall, which was the headquarters for the union. We understood that there were jobs picketing. Some of the big AFL-CIO unions gave us some money. We had no idea what picketing meant at all. So this old man, I guess he must have been in his sixties, he says, "Come on with me." We get in this car with him, and about four police cars start following us. I said, "Oh, my God." I'd never been in trouble. When I came to this country, they told us to raise our right hand and swear we'd never do anything to violate the laws because they'd deport us. I was scared to death. We get out to this field, and the old man jumps out of the car with his sign, and he starts yelling at the crew of strikebreakers. So we follow, kind of sheepish, looking at all the deputy sheriffs with the guns. For all I knew, they were going to jump us at any moment. Next thing I know, this crew packs up and leaves. And I said, "Whoa." There was just this guy and me and my friend, standing around. He says, "OK, we're done, let's get in the car and go find another crew." We weren't arrested, we weren't beaten up, and the crew left. I thought, Boy, there's power to this thing. It was the first time I actually challenged authority in this country. And nothing had happened. Not only that, we had been successful in chasing off the strikebreakers. So I kept coming back, day in and day out, and then I became an organizer and I started working for the union. It became my life. I continued working with the Farm Workers Union until 1978. When I left, I went to work for about two years with AFSCME American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees organizing the University of California.

When I started working in the fields, I was making ninety cents an hour. At the end, we actually got the wages in some of those places up to seven, eight, nine dollars an hour. People had health insurance, they had a pension plan, they had paid holidays, not to mention the basics, such as toilets in the fields and cold drinking water. The growers, for the first time, started treating people with respect which I thought was a tremendous change. Prior to that, you couldn't challenge the growers, they were all-powerful. We just didn't think there was anything we could do. For the first time, people actually felt we have some rights, we can stand up for ourselves, we can fight, and we can win. That, to me, was the single most important accomplishment of the union.

There are anywhere between eight and eleven million undocumented workers in the U.S. Some industries are as much as fifty to seventy-five percent undocumented workers. If some administration would decide to deport every undocumented worker in agriculture, hotels, restaurants, and building service, you would wipe out those industries; there would not be anybody left to do that work. All of these stores where we get all the vegetables and all of these things, these hotels, they would be wiped out because that workforce is critical to them.

When we came from Mexico, driven by poverty, most of us went into the fields. Many other Mexicans started going into the cities and began working in hotels and restaurants and in janitorial and construction. Going into the seventies, when there was war in Central America and death, and hurricanes, a lot of people left those countries and also came to the U.S., some of them because of what was going on in the country, some of them, like us, because of poverty. They came, like any immigrant, took whatever job they could, regardless of wages and conditions, anything to be able to survive. But as they began to live here, they also began to assert their rights. I think you've seen over the last ten years an explosion of organizing by Latinos and immigrants. And that's injected a whole new sense of hope and new blood into the American labor movement. Women, Asiatics, they're the new lifeblood of this movement. And young. The people that leave the countries are young. In my old home state, Zacatecas, it's very small. You go to whole towns and the only people in these towns that are left are the old and the little kids. Anybody else that's in between is in the U.S. So you've got all these young people coming to this country, and they have this energy and enthusiasm and they want to move forward. And they also have learned because of the struggles like the farmworkers, and they've heard of Cesar Chavez, and then they help drive movements like the Justice for Janitors movement in the U.S. Mexico, right now, the remittances from people here are the second or third largest source of income for Mexico. In Central American countries, it's number one. Those countries back home, their economies would collapse without the contributions and remittances of people here, but I would submit this country's economy would collapse without the immigrants.

If it hadn't been for the Farm Workers Union, I would still be in Delano. Maybe, if I had been lucky, I might be a foreman at a ranch. Otherwise, I'd still be picking grapes. I got an eighth-grade education. Yet here I am now, working with people who are attorneys and doctors.

Thirty-something years ago, when I was first here as a young farmworker, I heard a labor song, and it talked about how freedom is a hard-won thing, and it said that every generation has to win it again. In the Justice for Janitors campaign we learned from the lessons of the farmworkers and they learned from the civil rights movement, and the civil rights movement learned from what happened in India with Gandhi. It will probably be beyond my lifetime, but if all we've done is to inspire other people to continue with the struggle, that will have been enough.

[continued]